LOS ANGELES — Yoko Ono will stage her first solo museum exhibition in Southern California at the Broad museum this spring. The legendary 92-year-old artist, activist and wife of John Lennon is set to open her show, "Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind," on May 23. The interactive exhibition, organized in collaboration with Tate Modern in London, will run through Oct. 11, 2026, the Broad announced Thursday.

One of the first things guests will see when they approach the museum during Ono's show will be an outdoor installation created using the Broad's olive trees from its outdoor plaza. These will be transformed into "wish trees" for the city — a nod to an installation that Ono first created in 1996 at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica. Viewers will be invited to write wishes on tags and attach them to the branches.

"Yoko's work has never been bound by place or time, but this really feels like the right moment for a show like this in Los Angeles," Ono's studio director, Connor Monahan, wrote in an email. "Her work transforms audiences from observers into participants, helping to shape the works and the exhibition itself. That sense of agency and connection feels especially powerful right now, and I think Los Angeles, with its spirit of experimentation and openness, will really embrace that."

Ono has been a riveting, beloved and sometimes controversial force in the worlds of music, art and pop culture since the early 1960s when she became associated with New York's John Cage-inspired Fluxus movement — formed by a community of experimental artists who based their work in performance practice and avant-garde principles.

From the start, Ono's art was performative and interactive. It was also informed by the trauma of living in Tokyo during World War II, an experience that would feed her lifelong commitment to peace, love and understanding between people and communities.

Her positivity famously resonated with Lennon upon their first meeting in 1966 at London's Indica Gallery where Ono was setting up an exhibition of conceptual, interactive art. One of the pieces featured a ladder with a magnifying glass at the top. When Lennon climbed the ladder and looked through the magnifying glass, he made out the word "yes," written in small letters on a canvas attached to the ceiling.

"So it was positive. I felt relieved. It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn't say 'no' or 'f— you' or something, it said 'yes,'" Lennon said in an interview with People about his first meeting with Ono.

"Yoko Ono's ideas about peace, imagination and collective participation are both timeless and newly urgent at a moment when division seems to dominate every news cycle, and communities here and around the world resiliently build toward a better future," Joanne Heyler, founding director and president of the Broad, said in an email. "The multidisciplinary and wide-ranging practice she began more than 70 years ago remains strikingly contemporary, as the boundaries between art, music and performance are, in her hands, challenged and reshaped, creating fresh emotional connection."

Heyler also noted that the museum rearranged its calendar to make room for Ono's show in order to "quickly bring its timely themes to L.A."

The Broad show will feature Ono's interactive "instruction" exhibits from the mid-1950s to the present. These pieces feature brief texts that suggest actions for guests to complete or contemplate. Viewers will also see the typescript drafts for her 1964 book, "Grapefruit," which includes more than 200 instructions in the form of music, painting, events, poetry and objects.

Ono's work as an activist will also be highlighted through materials and ephemera used in her peace campaigns, including protests done in collaboration with Lennon such as "Acorn Event" (1968) and "Bed Peace" (1969), in which the husband and wife staged bed-in events in Amsterdam and Montreal where they sat in bed and took questions from the press in an effort to speak out against the Vietnam War.

There will also be plenty of film and video in the exhibition, including footage of "Cut Piece," a legendary piece of performance art first staged in 1964 at Yamaichi Hall, Kyoto, in which Ono sat quietly while the audience cut away pieces of her clothing.

"With so many creatives calling it home, Los Angeles is the perfect place to honor Ono's boundary-pushing practice and enduring vision," Sarah Loyer, Broad curator and exhibitions manager, wrote in an email. "Ono's work from the 1950s to today asks us to look at the world differently and find ways to make change, often starting within ourselves, toward peace. In Ono's work, personal stories and collective action come together in ways that I think will really resonate with Angelenos."

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